A wild bunch in Cornwall

Thirty years after its controversial release, Straw Dogs finally makes its TV debut. For the first time the stars tell of their traumatic experiences on Sam Peckinpah's set - and the truth behind the infamous rape scene

Sam Peckinpah's 'West Country western' Straw Dogs was finally cleared for UK video certification last year, ending a long-standing ban on this cause célèbre of Seventies cinema. A raw and bloody tale of violation and medieval retribution, in which young couple David and Amy Sumner are besieged by marauding locals in a remote Cornish cottage, Straw Dogs was originally denounced by critics and cut by censors who were shocked by its depiction of violence and its now infamous double rape scene. To accompany next weekend's UK terrestrial television premiere Channel 4 commissioned documentary maker Paul Joyce (director of the definitive Peckinpah study Man of Iron ) and myself to track down the film's key players including leading actors Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, and re-visit the scene of one of cinema's most notorious crimes. What we found was a film which, according to George, 'lives in my mind like a dream', a traumatic and troubling work the madness of which still haunts all those involved and still arouses admiration and outrage in equal measure.

Even before shooting began in 1971, the film had provoked controversy. Scottish writer Gordon Williams, author of the source novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm , publicly berated David Z. Goodman's script as a 'distortion' of his work. In retaliation, Peckinpah, who made his name with the ultra-violent western The Wild Bunch , likened Williams's book to 'drowning in vomit'. 'Actually I've never read the book,' says Williams, who wrote it in a matter of days. 'Maybe you could drown in vomit reading it. I don't know - I wouldn't want to risk it.'

Shot in freezing conditions in and around the village of St Buryan, about five miles from Land's End, Straw Dogs can be interpreted as either an interrogation or a celebration of the destructive male psyche. Dustin Hoffman, whose central character David Sumner journeys from meek mathematician to violent avenger during the course of the drama, told us: 'I was aware of a duplicity in myself. I was against the war in Vietnam, and yet violence also attracted me, and I thought that maybe I could put some of that into the character.

'I was attracted by the idea of playing someone who is running away from an external problem, who leaves America because it is becoming too violent, but who isn't dealing with the internal problem. The irony was that ultimately David would have to face his own demons and his own repressed attraction for violence. That fascinated me, but I was also fearful that if this theme wasn't addressed in an explicit enough fashion, the film could just be knocked off as a "violent movie". And in fact, when we started shooting, it became clear that Sam was less interested in attacking these nuances than just shooting "Sam's movie".'

The pursuit of 'Sam's movie' led Peckinpah (who famously hurled hunting knives while conducting business meetings) to drive his cast to extremes, turning them into what actor Peter Vaughan called 'his British Wild Bunch'. So fearsome were Sam's endeavours to this end that several members of the cast ended up as walking wounded, a fact testified to on-screen: David Warner was on crutches (the result of an unrelated de-fenestration incident), and Irish star T.P. McKenna spent Straw Dogs in a sling after another actor fell onto him during a drink-and-strippers party organised by Peckinpah to ferment a 'gang mentality' in the yokel cast.

'This guy was standing on a table with a naked lady, and the table broke,' laughs McKenna. 'They both fell on me, and I went flying backward through my chair, smashing it into bits, and fracturing my shoulder in three places. I remember later on running into Kenneth Williams who said "Ooooo the black sling is soooo sinister." I said "Sinister my arse! I broke my fucking shoulder!'"

Another actor, Ken Hutchison, was invited one evening to Indian wrestle with Sam who kicked him in the face, causing bleeding and swelling. According to legend, when Hutchison showed up on set the next day, bloodied and bruised, Peckinpah screamed 'What the hell happened to you?', apparently oblivious to the previous night's antics.

'Sam was drinking heavily,' remembers studio executive Marty Baum 'and he wasn't completely in control of what he was doing.' Morning coffee laced with brandy added to the problems, which came to a head at the end of the second week of shooting.

Hutchison remembers: 'I was asleep in my hotel room at three o'clock in the morning when suddenly the door was... disintegrated. There was Sam, wearing a headband and poncho, a bottle of Courvoisier in his hand. He said "Get up, we're going to Land's End to shout at the moon!" So we went to Land's End, where it was freezing cold and pitch black; you could hear the waves crashing on the rocks, and feel yourself getting soaked, but you couldn't see a thing. The bottle was passed between us, Sam did some howling, and after a while we went home. Next thing I know, he's got walking pneumonia, and the whole production gets shut down.'

Sent to a clinic in London to 'recuperate', Peckinpah had to face the possibility of being fired. Del Henney, a stoical British actor cast as Amy's former boyfriend (and later rapist) Charlie, says: 'I remember this little American guy with a cigar saying "You know any good directors in town?'"

Eventually reinstated on a promise of sobriety, Peckinpah returned to work where he resumed his regime of psychological and physical intimidation to keep his cast in an appropriate state of exhaustion and anxiety. 'He would play with you just to create an atmosphere,' Hutchison says. 'At one point he said to me, "That Del Henney thinks you're a shit actor." Of course you know it's a wind-up. But the bottom line is that when you come to do the scene, there's a little engendered seed there going "Well maybe he did say that". He stirred us up to get a tension, which worked for the film.'

Susan George, who gave a career-making performance as Amy Sumner, found that the rigours of filming included getting slapped, battered and bruised in the name of art. 'I did get beaten up, quite badly, during the shooting of the siege,' she recalls, returning with us to St Buryan, where she is instantly recognised and embraced by the locals, 'but almost all the violent acts in the movie were done on the first take. We would do something horrific, something violent, something unbelievably dangerous, and then we would move on.'

This appeared to be the rule both on location in Cornwall, where the siege exteriors were filmed during a series of gruelling night shoots, and back in London, where the interiors were played out in a more controlled studio environment. It was here that Hoffman came up with a novel method of portraying the perverse relish which his character takes in beating an intruder to death (off-screen) with a poker.

'I went into [producer] Dan Melnick's office and said "I want coconuts!'" Hoffman says, bewilderingly. 'I'm not a violent person: I had never shot a gun, or ever really gotten into a fight. But I had thought a lot about the stuff I was going to have to do in the last act of the film. And I knew that by that point the character I played was, on some level, enjoying the violence, so I wanted to enjoy it too. Now, obviously I wouldn't enjoy hitting somebody's head, but I thought I would enjoy kicking the shit out of a coconut. The audience then becomes the collaborator: they're not seeing a coconut, they're seeing someone up there who's enjoying bashing someone's skull in. And I remember in one of the takes some of the coconut came out and Sam saw it in the rushes and he loved it because it looked like brain-matter flying out!'

While Hoffman was smashing coconuts, Susan George had to prepare for the rape scene which has since made Straw Dogs notorious, but which was described only in the vaguest terms in the script, and remained shrouded in ominous silence throughout the shoot. When Peckinpah finally and reluctantly agreed to discuss the scene, he announced bluntly: 'I don't intend to tell you how I'm going to shoot it, but I will tell you that you are going to be naked; two men are going to attack you; one is going have sex with you; and the other man is going to bugger you.'

'At 20 years of age,' remembers George, 'I have to say I sat back in my chair and said "What does that mean?" So he told me. And I was terrified. The way he was talking, it seemed to me that he was intending on this being an actual thing, that was really going to take place on the set. So I got up out of my chair, looked him in the eye, and said "I'm not prepared to do that Sam." And he said "You will do it." I said "No, you didn't hear me - I am not prepared to do it, and you must find yourself another Amy.'"

Recriminations followed, during which George boldly held her ground even when threatened with legal action for breaking her contract. Finally (and impressively) the usually implacable Peckinpah caved in and agreed to let George try to depict Amy's trauma by concentrating on her eyes and face, rather than her body. The resulting scene, a strange mix of the explicit and the oblique, has since become the focus of heated controversy, with former chief censor Stephen Murphy insisting on cuts to alleviate his worries about the physical aspects of the assault, while his successors banned the film from video because of its psychological message - namely the 'clear implication' that Amy actually enjoys being assaulted by her former boyfriend Charlie.

Bizarrely, when finally passing Straw Dogs on video last year, the British Board of Film Classification cited the inclusion of additional rape footage (as opposed to cuts) as crucial to their decision, claiming that the version previously rejected had been a pre-cut American print from which a traumatic second rape by another member of Charlie's gang (which Amy clearly does not enjoy) was largely absent. 'The ambiguity of the first rape is given context by the second rape' says the BBFC's official statement 'which now makes it quite clear that sexual assault is not something that Amy ultimately welcomes.' Or in other words, the cut version is unacceptable, but the uncut version is fine.

For Straw Dogs , and its director, such contradictions are typical. 'Sam was an extraordinary man,' says Susan George now. 'He was a romantic at heart and yet he felt unbearably beaten up. That's why, I think, he was so cruel to women, and had this love-hate relationship with them. There was such a huge conflict within him. I do believe that he would have walked on water for somebody he loved. But he also would have pushed them under.'

· Mantrap: Straw Dogs The Final Cut is on C4 on Saturday; Straw Dogs follows on Sunday 10 August